Abstract
The history of the history of science reveals changing styles; for the late nineteenth century Galileo was the model of the empirical and positivistic scientist, formulating general laws à la Mach, as summaries of experimental data. For more recent writers such as Koyre and Burtt, Galileo was a Platonist whose revolutionary work sprang almost full-grown from his head and who did not do the experiments described in his dialogues — fortunately, for they would not have worked if he had done them. I do not propose to take up the issue of the Platonism or non-Platonism of Galileos mathematical science; the issue here is that these writers argue that Galileo did thought-experiments in the course of developing his theories, and referred to experience primarily as a final check in order to be sure that he hadnt gone wildly astray.1 This rationalist picture of Galileo has been thoroughly criticized recently by Drake, Settle, and others,2 who have shown that Galileo’s notebooks give ample evidence that he did do experiments at the time when he was probably developing the analysis of freely falling bodies, and that these were reasonably accurate. Furthermore, even some of the experiments described in his dialogues give good results when done today. I shall argue for another, related point, that in any event, Galileo’s own writings, particularly the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and the Two New Sciences, give ample evidence that he considered experience essential for the foundation of his science and not only as a check on the results.
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An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science in january, 1977. I wish to thank the commentator, Professor John V. Strong of boston College, and Professors Robert S. Cohen and Marx Wartofsky for their criticisms. I am also grateful to Professors Stillman Drake, William wallace, and Winifred L. Wisan for their suggestions. The Collection of essays by R. E. Butts and J. C. Pitt, New Perspectives on Galileo, Western Ontario Series, Vol. 14 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), has several essays which are realated to this paper, particularly those by Wisan and McMullin, but it appeared too late for me to use it.
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References
For instance, “For it is thought, pure unadulterated thought, and not experience or sense-perception, as until then, that gives the basis for the ‘new science’ of Galileo Galilei”, Alexandre Koyre, Metaphysics and Measurement (London: Chapman and Hall, 1968), p. 13. See also Giorgio de Santillana, Reflections on Men and Ideas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), p. 175, Galileo uses facts only as a check, as a discriminator between necessary and wishful arrangement.
Thomas Settle, An Experiment in the History of Science, Science 133 (1961), pp. 19-23; Galileos Use of Experiment as a Tool of Investigation, in E. McMullin (ed.), Galileo, Man of Science (New York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. 315-337; Stillman Drake, Galileos Experimental Confirmation of Horizontal Inertia. Unpublished Manu¬scripts, Isis 64 (1973), pp. 290 - 305.
Galileo, Two New Sciences, trans. S. Drake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), p. 212. This translation is generally more reliable than the earlier one by Crew and de Salvio. Both give the pagination of the Edizione Nazionale of Galileos works (Volume 8), and I refer to this with the italicized page numbers.
I discuss this in Experience and Its Idealizations in Modern Science (Proceedings of the Ohio Philosophical Association, 1980, pp. 25-36), in which I take up the question of how the idealizations of mathematical science are related to manifest experience; this issue has also been discussed by Edmund Husserl in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans, by D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern Univer¬sity Press, 1970 ), Part II.
Galileo and Reasoning 2? Suppositions The Methodology of the Two New Sciences, in R. S. Cohen PSA 1974, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 32 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1976), pp. 79–104.
Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, trans, by S. Drake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 2nd revised edition.
See The Assayer in The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, trans, by S. Drake and O’Malley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), pp. 183–184, for the complete text.
J. Hintikka and U. Remes, The Method of Analysis, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 25 ( Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1974 ).
The Controversy on the Comets, p. 309; Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. S. Drake (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 274.
Such as Dudley Shapere, in Galileo: A Philosophical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 127, despite his disagreement with Koyre about Galileo’s rationalism.
Such as Dudley Shapere, in Galileo: A Philosophical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 127, despite his disagreement with Koyre about Galileo’s rationalism.
E. Cassirer, ‘Galileo’s Platonism’, in A. Montagu (ed.), Studies in Honor of George Sarton (New York: H. Schuman, 1944); Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations; T. McTighe, ‘Galileo’s Platonism: A Reconsideration’, in Galileo, Man of Science; J. H. Randall, “The Development of Scientific Method in the School of Padua’, Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940); P. Wfener, “The Tradition Behind Galileo’s Methodology”, Osiris 1 (1936).
Neal Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960 ), Part II.
S. Drake, ‘Impetus Theory Reappraised’, Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975), pp. 27–46.
Impetus Theory Reappraised, pp. 41-42; also Drakes introduction to his translation of Two New Sciences. See also Galileos dialogue, ‘On Euclid’s Definitions of Ratios,’ in S. Drake, Galileo at Work ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978 ), pp. 422–436.
Free Fall and Uniform Acceleration’, in Galileo Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), pp. 214–239.
On the application of this proposition to non-uniform motion, see Drake, ‘Velocity and Eudoxian Proportion Theory, Physics 15 (1973), pp. 49–64.
See her The New Science of Motion: A Study of Galileos De motu locali, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 13 (1974), p. 284, Note 13.
I. B. Cohen has pointed out essentially the same thing, in Galileos Rejection of the Possibility of Velocity Changing Uniformly with Respect to Distance, Isis 47 (1956), pp. 231–235. 26 See the Drake paper cited in Note 2 and J. MacLachlan, A Test of an Imaginary Experiment by Galileo, Isis 64 (1973), pp. 374–379.
William Gilbert, De Magnete, trans, by P. Fleury Mottelay ( 1893; reprinted New York: Dover Publications, 1958), Book II, Chs. 17 - 22.
In ‘Galileo on Sense Experience and Foundations of Physics’, (Isis 68 (1977), pp. 108–110).
For an example of Galileo’s own use of mathematical analysis, see Wisan, “Hie New Science of Motion”, pp. 249–258.
Isaac Newton, Opticks (4th Edition, 1730; reprinted New York: Dover Publications, 1952), p. 404.
I. Lakatos, Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, In Lakatos, I. and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970 ), p. 187.
Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science ( Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966 ), pp. 157–177.
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Hemmendinger, D. (1984). Galileo and the Phenomena: On Making the Evidence Visible. In: Cohen, R.S., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Physical Sciences and History of Physics. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 82. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7178-3_7
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